Flying FiremenThe National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000. They are credited to Villemard.

There's speculation that they were included with "foodstuffs" of the era, much like the German postcards we looked at back in April.

Car ShoesThe BarberThe Avenue of the OperaA CuriosityI wonder if the "curiosity" referred to is the horse as an uncommon means of transportation, or the extinction of all animals as referenced in the 1900 Ladies' Home Journal article we looked at a while back.The Electric Train From Paris to BeijingA RescueSpeak to the CaretakerThis image clearly takes its inspiration from another French futurist, Albert Robida, and his book The Twentieth Century.Sentinel Advanced in the HelicopterCyclist ScoutsPhonographic MessageOne For the RoadLady In Her BathroomHeating With RadiumHearing The NewspaperCorrespondence CinemaCars of WarBuilding SiteAt SchoolA Festival of FlowersA Chemical DinnerIt's amazing how long the idea of synthetic food has been with us. Before starting this blog I had assumed that the idea started with the Jetsons.Airship On The Long CourseThe TailorFlying Police

I love the construction site! I'm in architecture and it's not like that at all. Thank goodness, since having a building depend on one person would probably not be a very successful one. Thanks for posting these!

anne: Well, it's kind of true as well, since there are construction robots. I remember watching a documentary on TV about a robot that was able to build entire skyscraper floors.

Nice predictions anyway, a lot of them are pretty accurate. I always find it funny though how they think ahead a 100 years when it comes to technology, yet they can't imagine thinking outside the box when it comes to things like design, fashion or architecture. The most unusual item design-wise is the Paris-Bejing train imo.

Indeed, some of these have become a reality somehow. Car shoes are Wheelies and roller skates, perhaps even Segways, electric train to Beijing, although not so, there's one under the English channel which to me is far more impressive.

Most interesting is phonographic message and Hearing the Newspaper. The internet is that and more.

The most annoying thing though is that a lot of people for some reason believed by the year 2000 people would have personal flying machines. That won't happen for a long while still.

One thing that I always find interesting in these postcards that predict the future: They never seem to predict any changes in fashion. It's always the same things that people were wearing when the postcards were made. Yet even back then, I'm sure that fashions changed regularly.

they have machines acting on there own like they have some superior artificial intelligence.

this is not the case for example the picture of getting a hair cut or constructing a building. i guess the fact that they were right on some makes up for it. after all there is no way the could have known.

I think it's a marvelous piece of history. It's interesting to see his conception of a future that lacks one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history: electronics. Everything is mechanical, the planes still have wings made of coton...amazing

Everyone is mentioning about how the fashion stays the same. How about blade runner? And all our futuristic movies where everyone is wearing jumpsuits? And punk haircuts?The person did try, note the woman talking to the custodian shows her legs! This is 1910, mind you.

Sorry to disappoint, Salo, but yes, even the items about flying men have come to pass. Only here in the states, we call the flying firemen 'Smoke jumpers'. They use things called parachutes.And the flying policemen are just cops in choppers. Ever seen one of those?The brain-transfer? Ever hear of the Internet? Ever learn a foreign language at school and use the language lab setup with the headphones?Oh, and heating with radium? Well, ok it is radioactive material, even if it isn't radium...Judy

These are ridiculous. They are cartoonish at best. They only take what they know exist at the time and just add to it. The dress, haircuts, decor still is still suppose to look in 2000 as it did in 1910.

I'm sure that the predictions we have today for the next hundred years will be perceived just as "campy" as these are to us today. Let us not forget that Jules Verne who died in 1905, predicted many things in our century accurately such as air conditioning, the submarine, the automobile, and a trip to the moon where three astronauts are launched from Florida and return via a water landing. I wonder how many of there French prints are inspired by Mr. Verne rather than an original concept. It is also interesting that many of these predictions are identical to predictions that we make for the year 2100!

I love the fact that the "Car Shoes" picture shows a dude in the background eating concrete.

Great stuff.

Hey, wrt the "heating with radium" thing everyone's getting a chuckle out of, wasn't there a big craze for a while using radium in everything, even cocktail drinks? It seems I remember reading a horrifying article somewhere about folks whose jaws were eaten up with cancer because of the fad.

Gretchen-- good point on Roddenberry. The thing he did that was really smart though, was to focus his future not in the next century, but 300-400 years in the future. That way, by then, none of us would still be alive to see if he was right or not.

My favorite is the 'Heating With Radium' one. Lol. Nothing beats that winter chill better than Radium induced death! The other one that really captured my attention was the 'Correspondence Cinema', as it is pretty cool we have that today in the form of video-link conversations, which are only a 1-2 second lag away from being in real-time.

You've been "slash-dotted" on the Yahoo! e-mail group for Studio Foglio's "Girl Genius" webcomic! (Specialist subject: mad scientists and their handiwork.)

If these pictures are grocery giveaways then almost certainly they are for amusement and not serious futurology. I suppose we must consider that the visible future then included European imperial government of most of the world and continuing technological advance, and international tension... and we know what happened. "6/28 changed everything."

I agree: the horse in 1910 was still the, um, workhorse of transport, away from railways, you'd see horses every day, there were very few motor vehicles. Just as in our 2007 there are very few personal flying machines... but they exist, it's just that -you- don't own one. John Travolta has a Boeing 707 and a Gulfstream.

Flying firemen, thermal currents... maybe :-) As for radium -and- the "chemical dinner", I suppose the small quantities involved (tiny wineglasses and plates) are the point.

One thing... I don't see robots, that someone complained of; all of these machines have operators, or programmers - I don't think you work the bath machinery while you're in it. Now who invented the robot... Isaac Asimov pointed to Greek myth and "Frankenstein", there were children's clockwork toys, L. Frank Baum's Tiktok of Oz... he still had to be wound, as far as I recall.

The "stereotypical 'chinaman'" in the Paris-Beijing train is wearing a queue, which all Chinese were required to wear to show allegiance to the Manchu emperors, whose reign ended in 1911. As this was just before that time, showing them in this light isn't stereotypical, but reflects China at that moment without looking into the political future, which these prints clearly were not designed to do.